Minds Unleashed: How Principals Can Lead the Right-Brained Way

About the Book

Educational leadership continues to be the most powerful key to ensuring the successful future of all other professions, and thus, the quality of lives for people around the world. This book, your weekly reader, will allow you to have the conversations to help faculty and staff, to help kids. More importantly, these readings invite your thinking to go to different places in your mind as you search for meaning. They are designed to cause new thinking about some familiar issues, and of course, creativity in their solutions. It is this book’s intent to offer solutions for leaders at all levels to do things right, and to do what’s right, or better said, to do things “right-brained.” Our 52-weekly chapters will help you, first and foremost with your personal and professional capacities, as we address topics pertaining to all of the co-centric circles of impact noted above in the diagram.

Table of Contents:

Foreword
From the Right Side
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Your Core; Your Ceiling
Unit One: Forgiving in Advance
Unit Introduction
Chapter 1: People Watching
Chapter 2: No Good Deed Goes Unsuspected
Chapter 3: Wanting a Space
Chapter 4: Roadchips
Unit Two: A Different Dance
Unit Introduction
Chapter 5: Making Rules to Break Them
Chapter 6: The Launch
Chapter 7: A Word on College
Unit Three: “Capital”-izing
Unit Introduction
Chapter 8: Hardball and Scouting
Chapter 9: Getting Up, Then What?
Chapter 10: Deflected Learning in Teaching
Chapter 11: The Next 10,000 Hours
Unit Four: Getting There from Here
Unit Introduction
Chapter 12: It’s Not School Improvement
Chapter 13: What Does Buy-In Look Like?
Chapter 14: Next Page of the Blueberry Story
Chapter 15: Too Much Action
Chapter 16: What’s Not Important
Unit Five: A Left-Brained Off-Ramp
Unit Introduction
Chapter 17: Measuring Smarter Not Harder
Chapter 18: The Name Game
Chapter 19: Not All Good Teachers Are Effective
Unit Six: Locking & Loading
Unit Introduction
Chapter 20: An “I” for an “I”
Chapter 21: Two Wrongs Might Equal One Right
Chapter 22: Knight Moves
Chapter 23: Restraint and Combustion
Unit Seven: The Clue Phone
Unit Introduction
Chapter 24: Leadership in Dog Years
Chapter 25: Between Anything Relevant
Chapter 26: A Reason to Perform Poorly
Chapter 27: The Jeopardic Method
Unit Eight: Undiscussibles
Unit Introduction
Chapter 28: Not Like the Picture
Chapter 29: Do Schools Need Leadership?
Chapter 30: A Principal’s Proper Parenting
Chapter 31: Topics for Toasties
Unit Nine: X-Ray Vision
Unit Introduction
Chapter 32: Organizational Illusions
Chapter 33: Opportunity/Cost
Chapter 34: Other School Seasons
Chapter 35: Intentional Impracticality
Chapter 36: Scrambles in Schools
Unit Ten: Another Off-Ramp
Unit Introduction
Chapter 37: Upon the Labyrinth
Chapter 38: Delta Force of Leadership
Unit Eleven: Going Deep
Unit Introduction
Chapter 39: An Exercise Regimen
Chapter 40: Each Day, an Interview
Chapter 41: Rejecting Art in Leadership
Chapter 42: In Leadership’s Wake
Chapter 43: Doing Less, Intentionally
Chapter 44: Ascension
Chapter 45: The Moment Learning Happens
Unit Twelve: Building a Cult
Unit Introduction
Chapter 46: Teachers Behaving Badly
Chapter 47: Your School’s Culture Muscle
Chapter 48: Power and Followership
Chapter 49: Your Importance; Your Ceiling
Chapter 50: Learning from Toxic Teachers
Chapter 51: The Best Schools Have . . .
Chapter 52: Your Cultural Investment
When Time Allows . . .
The Last Word
Conclusion: Outroduction

About the Author :

Dr. Ryan A. Donlan, as Assistant Professor in Indiana State University’s Department of Educational Leadership in the Bayh College of Education, served for twenty years in K-12 education, much of that time as a principal and superintendent. He is an avid leadership and teacher trainer and is a public speaker and visionary for the future of education. Dr. Donlan, once a frequent skydiver, today enjoys more conservative pursuits. He has also written/co-written Gamesmanship for Teachers: Uncommon Sense is Half the Work and The Secret Solution: How One Principal Discovered the Path to Success. Dr. Donlan can be followed on Twitter at www.twitter/ryandonlan and his website visited, at http://www.ryandonlan.com/


Steve Gruenert is the department chair of the Educational Leadership department at Indiana State University. He helped design the Indiana Principal Leadership Institute, has coordinated the Principal Preparation Program at Indiana State, and has been a principal at both the high school and middle schools levels. His research passion is school culture and climate, and he continues to engage with leaders at the national and international levels, helping them to think about the role of culture in school improvement.

Review :
Minds Unleashed is a powerful ‘weekly read’ for leaders and teams, very unique in its approach, and certainly a way to get a group talking about some of the important issues we face in K-12 education. I highly recommend it! Having a book in which chapters can be read in just minutes at a time, in any order, is certainly something that I appreciate and can recommend to those in my professional learning network. Do you have 15 minutes a week to sharpen your leadership skills? Minds Unleashed is a collection of 52 weekly readings that will give you a new way of looking at leadership. With fresh examples and vivid metaphor, this book will spark creative solutions to problems old and new. Principals are busy people. Our breaks are seldom, and lunchtimes frequently come after students have been dismissed. If we are not intentional with our time to reflect on practice, we risk becoming stagnant. Ryan and Steve have provided educational leaders with a tool for reflection and growth. This book makes it easy to spend minutes each week reading and thinking about our teams, our school districts, and ourselves. If you are looking for a book to help initiate conversations about leadership, challenging the status quo, and encouraging positive deviance, then turn to Minds Unleashed: How Principals Can Lead the Right-Brained Way.